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Topic: First time queen rearing, hopefully with the pictures (Read 1960 times)

Hello, I have not posted alot and most of my 4 years experience has been with catching swarms. This was the first year that I have had a swarm make it through the winter. I split that hive putting the queen with 6 frames and moved to a new location. The parent hive has just hatched out a queen. I purchased 4 3-lb packages of Buckfasts which were shipped a month late and 2 of the 4are doing well with 3 1/2 to 4 frames of capped worker brood with nice pattern. The other 2 have spotty drone brood and no capped worker, both queens are present. I also purchased 8 NUCs and queens were seen in 7 of them but the 8th displayed queenless behavior and upon thorough inspection 20 June had no eggs, no capped brood and no larva. The friend I got the NUCs from is close by and offered to mail a queen if I needed her, or I could go pick her up, but because I am me and have been fascinated with the idea of raising queens, I fashioned a dipping stick as described in Contemporary Queen Rearing by H.H. Laidlaw, dipped 30 cups, attached them to 2 bottom bars- 15 to a bar, 7/8" apart. I put these two bars in a frame and got this

Then I went to the yard where my split is at that now fills 2 deeps and in which I had observed 4 complete frames of unhatched eggs on 17 June, (it's now 20 June) I took a frme that still had eggs around the edge and climbed in my car and with a bent tipped awl grafted my first 30 larva, I took the ones closest to the unhatched eggs. broke off 1 cup so now have 29. Put a frame of capped brood from this hive in a NUC box and took this stuff back home. I put the cups in the queenless colony which is being fed 1:1 syrup, and put the capped brood with bees next to it. Inspected today with my 9 year old assistant Elias, shown here and this is what we found

It appears that the bees are drawing out 12 of the 29. Just wanted to share and get any thoughts. Thanks

Update, when a queen emerges in another hive and returns 4 doors down, i.e. the queen cell starter hive, the nicely fed queen larvae and drawn out cells will be trimmed back to just empty cups. So I'm trying again. Two queenless hives with added nurse bees, 15 grafts to each hive and feeding 1:1 syrup. Grafted by the donor hives as one of the dogs needed my bee brush for something and has not yet returned it. Seeing what I was doing with bees walking all over was not nearly as easy as grafting while sitting in the car with no bees on the comb. How frequently can I pull the cell bar frame to look at or should I just wait till day 10 when I relocate cells?

How frequently can I pull the cell bar frame to look at or should I just wait till day 10 when I relocate cells?

I check my grafted cells at the end of the fourth day after grafting to count the number of finished cells.I put the cells into nucs 9 days after grafting.I grafted cells on 9/20/08, checked for finished cells on 9/04/08, caged out queens today 9/28/08 and on 9/29/08 I put in cells.The 9th day after grafting cells are out of the cell builder only a few minutes before they go into their nucs.My mated queen average is 90% and higher!Regards,Ernie